LICENCE TO LAUGH

Learn to bear your pain in aloneness,
But don’t bear your aloneness in pain.
Aloneness should bring relief from stress,
Should help you inner peace to attain.

Being alone with your sorrow is sad;
Share your aloneness instead with your gladness.
Seclusion allows the Healing Power of GOD
to save you from overstimulation and madness.

And you will be born anew in silence,
For aloneness is the mother of transformation.
And joy shall be your portion and your licence
To laugh again, in you a flame of Devotion.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Poems from the inner river

THROUGH HONESTY

Don’t be ashamed
Pour it all out
The heart is tamed
and freed from doubt
by the bravery of honesty.

Let those that hurt you
continue to mock you
It still cannot stop you
from healing through honesty
and growing through adversity.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Poems from the inner river

MAY YOU

May you grow
Like the flowers you love so much

May you sow
Seeds of fruits that nourish as such

May you glow
Under the purity of a true lover’s touch

May you know
Honesty to which you can safely clutch.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Poems from the inner river

THE LOUD CROWD

The loud crowd
Is soft to my heart
Their warmth is gold
When they smile they hold
My heart with love untold
In their family fold.
Good people don’t need
To be perfect to lead -
Their goodness leads you home.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Poems from the inner river

WRONG AND RIGHT

How can something so strong
be so wrong? Go so wrong?
We don’t belong to our emotions,
they belong to us, but our devotions
are more accurate and honest,
what we long for the strongest.
Pain brings so much blessing
to every soul that learns its lesson
and undergoes transformation,
maturation and the realisation
that it wasn’t wrong after all,
it was a strong and jarring Call
to wake up before you fall.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Poems from the inner river

RIGHT THINGS

Do the right things
And do the things right
Spread your light wings
And make your wings light
Whatever the flight brings
Inner buoyancy brings flight
Up into the bright rings
Where happiness rings bright.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Poems from the inner river

FORGET IT

How humility can guide you
To find yourself if you let it -
How anger can ride you 
To death if you won’t forget it -

Forget it, it’s done and gone,
Your pain is the healing kind -
When you lost her, you won
A deeper heart, a higher mind.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Poems from the inner river

ASSUMPTION IS THE FILTER OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Realising you’ve been deceived
Is very hard to believe
Because it looked so real
How it made you feel
But that is the first rule of deception
It must never look like deception
When you look at a wolf clothed as a sheep
You don’t see a wolf clothed as a sheep
You see a sheep. Everything around you
Could be a cover created to confound you.
Our wishes, insecurities, vanities, memories,
Propensities - they all block our senses.
Assumption is the filter of consciousness.
Worse, presumption. Everything is a dress,
And who or what is wearing each dress
You will learn by experience as you progress.
But as you become more knowledgeable
You ironically also become more gullible.
You are stunned, as you learn and grow,
To realise there’s still so much you don’t know.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Poems from the inner river

TIME AND DEEDS

Only happiness can defeat sadness
Only honesty to oneself can defeat madness
Only goodness can defeat badness

Mirroring darkness is not our business
Rather for the Light we bear witness
And learn gradually to feel forgiveness

At a point words become meaningless
Whether we speak more or speak less
We’ll misunderstand each other nevertheless

Only time and deeds and steadfastness
Only consistency in human friendliness
Only self-control and gentlemanliness

Will grant our hearts again to each other access.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije 
Poems from the inner river

WHAT WORDS CAN DO

I’ve learnt the hard way
What words can do
When I write or say
Them to you.

When I think you will read between the lines
You read the lines,
And when I think you will read the lines
You read between the lines.

Sometimes I think you will understand
That I don’t really mean what I’m saying,
But the words enter you and start to expand
And exact a price I will long be paying.

Because words carry life
And words carry meaning,
A word that cuts and kills like a knife
May not be corrected by a word of healing.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Poems from the inner river